Kansas City journalist Aviva Okeson-Haberman, 24, killed by bullet in her apartment
Update: The Kansas City Police Department confirmed that Aviva Okeson-Haberman, who had previously been on life support, died Monday. Her death is now being investigated as a homicide.
A Kansas City journalist has died after being hit by a bullet while in her apartment.
Aviva Okeson-Haberman, 24, was struck by a bullet Friday afternoon that pierced her window while she was in her first-floor apartment in the 2900 block of Lockridge Avenue, Kansas City police said. She was a reporter with KCUR.
Okeson-Haberman joined KCUR in 2019, according to the radio station. She most recently covered Missouri government and politics. She interned at KCUR in 2018.
“Above all, she was sweet, kind and gracious, giving little hint of the strength of purpose that made her such a skilled and tough reporter,” according to a KCUR story announcing her killing.
Many colleagues, community members and public officials, including Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, took to Twitter Sunday to offer memories and condolences.
“I lost an amazing colleague this afternoon,” KCUR’s Matt Long-Middleton wrote on Twitter Sunday. “Aviva Okeson-Haberman was brilliant and lived quiet power/brilliance/bravery. The world lost an amazing person.”
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas wrote Sunday on Twitter that Okeson-Haberman had compassion for the voiceless.
“Aviva was a creative, thorough, challenging, and insightful reporter. Always prepared, she told the full and complex story of our city in one of the most challenging years in its history,” he wrote in part. “Her death lays bare our gravest unsolved epidemic and the preventable tragedies too many families endure.”
Shootings in Kansas City have spiked in recent years. As of Sunday morning, 47 people, not including Okeson-Haberman, have been killed in Kansas City in 2021, according to data compiled by The Star. Most victims died by gunfire. Kansas City ended last year with 182 homicides, the most in the city’s history in a single year.
“Aviva was brilliant,” KCUR news director Lisa Rodriguez said in the station’s story. “Even as an intern, her approach to storytelling and her ability to hold those in power accountable paralleled many a veteran reporter. She was quiet, which made it all the more satisfying to hear her challenge politicians and hold her ground, even when people in positions of great power tried to belittle her.”
In her time in Kansas City, Okeson-Haberman covered stories touted by KCUR that included corruption in Clay County and inequities in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
In 2019, reporting by Okeson-Haberman and another journalist on Missouri’s elder abuse hotline led to an investigation by the state’s attorney general’s office, KCUR reported. Their story revealed that in 2018, half of the 92,000 calls to the hotline went unanswered. The attorney general later announced significant changes to the state’s reporting system.
“Aviva always asked me tough questions but also laughed at my bad jokes—a sincerely kind spirit and kickass at her job,” Morgan Said, a spokeswoman for Mayor Quinton Lucas, also wrote on Twitter.
Last month, Okeson-Haberman featured a story on a nurse working in the emergency room at Truman Medical Centers by recording the woman’s pandemic diary. It was the same hospital where the young journalist was taken Friday after she was shot.
Keith King, a spokesperson with Truman Medical Centers, wrote on Twitter that Okeson-Haberman covered stories about the hospital’s frontline workers “with care and compassion.”
Okeson-Haberman attended high school in Springfield, Missouri, and was a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism.
Ryan Famuliner, an associate professor at MIZZOU, called Okeson-Haberman one of the most talented student reporters he’s worked with, calling her dogged and compassionate.
“But at the same time, she was so humble. So thoughtful. So kind,” Famuliner wrote on Twitter. “In that way she was an enigma because so many times our high achievers are driven by competition. But she was just driven by doing good. Being helpful. And dammit she had so much left to do.”
Her senior year, Famuliner added, Okeson-Haberman won the National Hearst Award, among other national awards.
“Sharing this with unspeakable sadness,” KCUR’s Brian Ellison wrote on Twitter. “I got to work with Aviva many times. She was a fantastic journalist. But mostly, she was a kind, generous colleague in the adjacent cubicle. We overuse the word “tragedy” sometimes; this is truly one of the worst tragedies I’ve ever known.”
The day she was shot, according to KCUR, Okeson-Haberman had been planning her move to Lawrence as part of her transition into a new role covering social justice issues and criminal justice as part of a reporting partnership based at KCUR.
“I’m absolutely gutted over the tragic loss of Aviva Okeson-Haberman,” Kansas City Councilman Eric Bunch tweeted Sunday. “She was an incredible journalist who had recently started covering the City Hall beat for KCUR. She was struck down in the mere beginning of her already bright career.”
Another of Okeson-Haberman’s colleagues, KCUR reporter Celia Llopis-Jepsen, wrote on Twitter that she was heartbroken.
“It is unbearable and impossible to comprehend that Aviva is gone,” Llopis-Jepsen wrote. “She was an amazing colleague. I am so lucky to have worked with her.”
Kansas City police on Friday reported that officers were dispatched to an apartment in Kansas City’s Santa Fe neighborhood for a welfare check. Arriving officers and members of the Kansas City Fire Department entered the apartment and found an individual suffering from a gunshot wound.
The victim was taken to the hospital with injuries described as serious and life-threatening, police said at the time.
KCUR reported that a colleague who covers criminal justice found Okeson-Haberman in her apartment and went to the hospital with her. According to the radio station, five shooting victims were taken to Truman Medical Centers the same evening as Okeson-Haberman.
Read KCUR’s full story on Okeson-Haberman here.
This story was originally published April 25, 2021 at 1:15 PM.
